Dating site eHarmony confirms password breach

The online dating site eHarmony confirmed late Wednesday that passwords for its members were exposed in a breach, a second major compromise following LinkedIn's password exposure.

Password hashes for eHarmony were released on the same Russian forum which published the LinkedIn hashes

By
Jeremy Kirk
| 07 Jun 2012

The online dating site eHarmony confirmed late Wednesday that passwords for its members were exposed in a breach, a second major compromise following LinkedIn's password exposure.

"After investigating reports of compromised passwords, we have found that a small fraction of our user base has been affected," wrote Becky Teraoka, of eHarmony's corporate communications.

EHarmony didn't say how many of its users may have been affected. The website said it had reset the passwords.

As with LinkedIn, eHarmony's exposed data is cryptographic representations of passwords called hashes, which are generated by an algorithm. But the hashes can be converted into the original password using free decoding software. The shorter the password, the higher the chance it can quickly be cracked.

EHarmony's 1.5 million password hashes were released in a forum of a Russian password-cracking website called InsidePro, reported Ars Technica.

Hackers on InsirePro asked for help cracking the password hashes, Ars reported. But by late Wednesday, those threads on the forum appeared to have been deleted and were not available in Google's cache.

LinkedIn confirmed on Wednesday that some of its passwords were compromised. Security researchers put the figure at 6.5 million, although some of the password hashes were duplicates, bringing the number down to around 5.8 million.

LinkedIn, which has not said how the breach occurred, is notifying people affected and resetting their passwords.

Comments

Gary Clark, SafeNet - 11:01 12-06-2012

The eHarmony security breach highlights once again the weaknesses in the hashed approach to password data protection revealed by the LinkedIn hack. A good outcome of this new rash of data breaches may be that consumers will demand real not ersatz encryption from their service providers. Hashed passwords simply don’t cut it and offer little real resistance to a determined hacker. Consumers really need to be reassured that their online service providers are taking data protection seriously and are applying end-to-end encryption to ensure users’ details and passwords are adequately protected against the latest security threats. Encryption, coupled with secure storage of the digital keys, will help organisations ensure that hackers cannot decrypt sensitive data even if they get hold of it.